Re: suggested change to sources.redhat.com page

[Jason Molenda <jason@molenda.com>]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 10:36:28AM -0800, Jason Molenda wrote:

> My two cents:  Of course it's inappropriate, that's why I wrote
> it.  Y'all can decide if you want to change it (I'm not going to
> mind one way or the other), but it isn't accidental 

I suppose I could stand to expand on this a bit.

I went overly informal on the front sourceware web page to make it
clear to users that they were no longer on a corporate site.  This
was largely in reaction to our earlier pathetic attempts to have
a corporate spin on free software PR (I'm thinking of the time
around 1994 - 1998).  Our cygnus.com site was trying so desperately
to be a large corporation that we looked like weak posers, and it
was so marketing-drenched that the important technical facts rarely
got through it all.

On sourceware I wanted to divorce from that corporate presence
entirely.  The only things marketing had a hand in are the mission
statement (I would never have written one, but it wasn't terrible
so I didn't mind) and the front page graphic (I think we paid some
consultant $1k or so to come up with "red").

Given that historical background, I wanted net.developers to know
that they were in a press release-free zone when they were on
sourceware, that they wouldn't have to wade through any marketing-style
English with little technical credence, that they would not see
"headquarter" used as a verb.

Maybe this isn't as necessary these days (I haven't looked at
redhat.com in a long time), in which case the change that this
person sent in is not objectionable - it still maintains the
important point of the privacy statement.


Jason